The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

by Irene Radford

  “Could the backlashed spell have worn off?” Fred asked from the shadows. Yaakke added more witchlight to the corridor to eliminate concealing darkness.

  “I doubt it. Krej’s original spell was meant to be permanent,” Jaylor replied. “Krej himself would have to remove the spell, and he can’t do it until he’s animate again.” He shifted his weight as if shrugging away an uneasy memory.

  Yaakke looked at his master and knew he relived the scene in Krej’s great hall last spring when Jaylor had freed Shayla from her glass prison. That spell was supposed to be unbreakable, too. The great effort of throwing the mighty magic had nearly killed Jaylor. Only Brevelan’s love and healing Songs had brought him back from the void between the planes of existence.

  Darville stopped square in front of his oldest friend. “Our thief must also know the tunnels. There are no maps of these passages. Few know they exist, fewer still know where they lead.”

  “I don’t know who it is,” Jaylor replied. “The magic signature doesn’t belong to any of my Commune. We don’t want Krej free to cause more trouble.” He looked directly at his apprentice for confirmation.

  Yaakke nodded, free of guilt. He’d thought about freeing Krej just to see if he could do it. For once he hadn’t followed through. All of Coronnan, including Yaakke, was better off with Krej frozen into his tin weasel statue.

  “I’ve got to get back to the banquet before people start asking questions.” Darville ran a hand through his hair.

  His right hand, Yaakke noted, not his normally dominant, but now damaged, left.

  Jaylor reached his left arm out to clasp Darville’s in friendship before they separated. Darville responded in kind. The lightest of squeezes on his forearm caused his brows to furrow and his shoulders to tense.

  “We’ve got to do something about that arm,” Jaylor whispered. Yaakke heard, but he doubted Fred did. “Maybe another session with Brevelan?”

  “No.” Darville stood firm. “I miss you both, terribly, but you have to leave the city before the Council guesses that you’ve been here.”

  “The Council of Provinces couldn’t keep me away. I’ve awaited this day since I was twelve and you were fourteen.” Jaylor’s smile lit his eyes with merriment.

  “The day I ran away from home to join your band of renegade boys. The best day of my life, even if it lasted only a few hours.” Darville returned the grin. Much of the pain drained from his face with the memory.

  Yaakke burned with jealousy. He’d never had a friend. Never had a family to run away from.

  “I’ve got to go.” Darville broke the hand clasp and took a decisive step toward his personal guard. “Jaylor.” He stopped his progress. “I miss your counsel. I’m working hard to rescind the banishment of magicians.”

  “I know, old friend. I’m working hard at it, too.”

  “How? You’re supposed to be in exile.”

  “Sometimes it takes an exile to find an exile.”

  “Shayla! You’ve got to find her.” The king winced as his left arm brushed against Fred.

  “I guess I have to send Yaakke on that mission.”

  “Everything will be fine, Your Grace, once I return with the dragons,” Yaakke burst forth. He had his quest. Jaylor had forgiven his earlier shortcomings and given him his quest!

  Dragons take them all! Almost we reached open water. Almost, we sailed free of Coronnan. Darville’s men followed in a fast galley. They overtook us and shot burning arrows into the sails. Then they boarded my ship with unsheathed weapons. My captain and his crew fought valiantly for our freedom. When all was lost, I planted the idea of suicide into their feeble minds. Better they all die than betray my spell of invisibility. Darville must never know ’twas I who stole Lord Krej.

  I can no longer flee to SeLenicca with my treasure. Where can I hide? Right under their noses, where they are least likely to look.

  Black mists chilled Yaakke to the bone. Utter blackness that had never known light. All of his senses stopped. He’d shiver with fright if he had a body to respond to his mind.

  All of his previous trips through the void had been brief—darting in and out in the middle of the transport spell. Familiarity didn’t make a transport spell any easier or less frightening. If he slipped in his concentration for even as long as a blink of the eye (presuming he still had eyes), he could end up permanently lost in this black nothingness.

  Yaakke fixed an image of Brevelan’s clearing in his mind. He saw the one-room thatched hut in the center, with a new lean-to affixed to the back: The coop where the flusterhens laid their eggs and the goat munched on her hay. A new weed in the kitchen garden and the layers of mulch Jaylor had laid on the big field to protect the last of the yampion roots. The closest thing to home Yaakke knew.

  Brevelan wasn’t there to open and close the barrier around the clearing. He’d have to shape-change into a wild animal to slip through. Remembering to change back into his human form afterward was the hard part of that little trick. He hoped Brevelan never learned he’d found a way in and out of her protected home.

  The blackness faded just a little. He pulled the image of the clearing into sharper focus and aimed his spell for the open space before the hut.

  Pulsing colored lines crisscrossed the lightest patch of nothingness. Could that be a door out of the void and back to reality? He reinforced the image of the clearing. The web of lines brightened. A sensation of speed propelled him toward the colors and he braced himself for contact with solid ground.

  He bounced against something soft. At least he thought that was the sensation. The only softness in the clearing might be the upper branches of a tree, or the thatched roof. But he hadn’t visualized either as his landing place.

  Carefully he scanned his surroundings with every sense available to him. Wild tangles of throbbing umbilicals, in every hue imaginable, wrapped around and around him like the tentacles of a giant sea monster. Between and behind the colored symbols of life forces the void continued, on and on. Nothing between here and eternity.

  He pushed a few cords away from what should be his face. Memory struck him. The time he’d entered the void with Jaylor to search for Queen Rossemikka’s life force when Krej had kidnapped her, these threads of life had encircled them both. During that spell, the sight of a magician’s blue umbilical fading to nothing had told Yaakke the moment Baamin died.

  The shock of the old man’s death had dropped him out of the void and the spell, leaving Jaylor alone, without an anchor to his corporeal body.

  Yaakke was stranded in the void now, body and all. He needed to find a familiar life and follow it out. He didn’t care where he landed as long as it was out of this sensation-robbing blackness.

  Dozens of life forces coiled around his body and tightened. Suffocation squeezed his mind to blankness. Desperately he clawed at the life-lines, seeking an exit. One shimmering white thread clung persistently. He grasped it to pluck it away from his heart. New images filled his head.

  A girl with moon-bright hair braided in a foreign style fell to her knees crying. She clutched a tubular pillow to her skinny chest. Wooden spindles dangled from the pillow by slender threads. An older man with similar features and hair ripped the clumsy bundle from her arms. Her father? One of the wooden spindles broke free of the pillow and fell back into the girl’s lap. She covered it with a fold of her dark skirt to hide it from the man. The well-dressed father then thrust the bundle into the greedy grasp of a tall, dark-eyed merchant. Money changed hands and the father grabbed the girl by the arm and dragged her away. She continued to clutch the hidden spindle.

  Yaakke dropped that life-thread as if it were hot, sensing danger to himself in the vision. Shame heated his mind as if he were responsible for the girl’s distress. Who was she? He was sure he’d never met her, never seen a woman with two four-strand brands that joined into one halfway down her back. Why was her life wrapped around his as if they were soul mates?

  He resisted the pull to view more of the gi
rl’s life. One more vision of her might answer his questions and quiet the longing that surrounded his heart. No time. He had to get out of the void.

  Somewhere there was an exit. But where? Blackness and the coils of lives stretched on toward infinity.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Where can the boy be?” Jaylor paced the flat roof atop the central keep of the last monastery dedicated to the priests of the Stargods. Its remote solitude had, so far, left it untouched by the purges of all enclaves of magicians. He feared their safety was only temporary. When the extremists ran out of targets for their venom, they would remember that a man must first be a magician before he became a priest. Temples and monasteries might lose their sacred protection.

  Jaylor glared at a long telescope mounted atop the crenellated wall as if the arcane instrument could provide answers. His concern for his missing apprentice demanded more immediate answers than his worry over political purges and the omens his study of the heavens offered.

  Master Fraandalor, known as Slippy within the intimate enclave of the Commune of Magicians, shrugged his shoulders in reply and positioned his eye to look through his own priceless equipment. “A quest is by necessity a solitary endeavor,” he said, still squinting through the lens toward the northeastern sky.

  “But he left the capital alone, before Brevelan and I did. He didn’t collect any drageen to buy supplies or wait for special instructions. I haven’t been able to find him in the glass for weeks and I’m worried about him.” Jaylor ran his left hand through his unrestrained hair, then finger-combed his beard. “He didn’t have the benefit of the trial by Tambootie smoke.”

  “We couldn’t put him through that, Jaylor.” Slippy made a notation on a piece of parchment without lifting his eyes from the telescope. “He hasn’t reached puberty yet. He wouldn’t have survived the ordeal.”

  “What happens when his body does make the change and his magic runs as wild as his emotions?” Jaylor resisted the urge to slam his fist into the long black tube that had been bequeathed to the first magicians of Coronnan by the Stargods.

  “I don’t know what will happen to Yaakke, Jaylor. The ritual of the Tambootie smoke is older than communal magic. If there were any records of what happens when a magic talent runs wild at puberty—especially a talent as strong as Yaakke’s—those records were destroyed. We lost so much knowledge by suppressing solitary magic.” Slippy shook his head in regret and returned to stargazing, the time-honored duty of all men of talent: magicians, healers, and priests of the Stargods.

  The knowledge gained by observation of the sun and moon and stars would become as scarce as true glass if the fanatics rallying around the Council of Provinces destroyed the Commune. The precious instruments could not be replaced. New ones made by the Sisters of the Stars never quite measured up to the originals. Only dragon fire was hot enough to burn the Kardia’s impurities out of sand to make glass clear enough for lenses. Normal furnaces left the glass too muddy and brittle for much of any use. Dragons hadn’t been cooperative or predictable for several generations. There were many reasons Yaakke had been sent to seek them.

  “I stalled Yaakke’s quest as long as I could, hoping he’d exhibit some signs of maturation while he learned something of responsibility.”

  “You did the best you could. He’s a headstrong boy with a mind of his own. Almost as determined and imaginative as you were at that age.” Slipppy chuckled without looking away from his telescope.

  “He’s at least thirteen, maybe as old as fifteen, and shows no sign of puberty. Do you suppose there’s something wrong, that he’ll never mature?” Jaylor asked the older magician.

  “Sometimes that happens. Usually when the boy has been the victim of privation and cruelty as an infant. Or if his mother was the victim of those conditions during pregnancy. Sometimes it just happens.”

  “We’ll never know if that’s the case with Yaakke. He was dropped off at the poor house when quite young. We have no idea how old he was. One year old, based on his size? Or closer to three, based upon his manual dexterity? By the time he was indentured to the University no one thought to test him for intelligence because his language skills were retarded.” More likely, he’d learned to keep his mouth shut in self-defense.

  “I have heard of some distant races where maturity comes late—people who tend to live to very advanced ages,” Slippy mused. “Could the boy hail from across the seas?”

  Jaylor shrugged. Yaakke’s thick dark hair, big lustrous eyes, and olive skin weren’t common features in Coronnan, but they were not unknown.

  “He’ll turn up eventually, Jaylor. Now get back to work. This unexpected meteor shower won’t last much longer. We need to record the data for interpretation later. Perhaps the unusual pattern is an omen of the dragons returning.”

  “Or a sign of disasters yet to come,” Jaylor grumbled as he bent to look through his instrument. “I wonder if I could sniff for his magic in the void?”

  “Don’t even think about it!” Slippy looked up aghast.

  “The last time you ventured into the void the dragons almost kept you.”

  “Yaakke never feared that damned transport spell. Sometimes I wish my apprentice had never discovered it.”

  “Next time you wish that, remember how important the spell is in keeping the Commune and our scientific equipment safe from that new cult, the Gnostic Utilitarians. Whoever heard of preferring to earn something by hard work, study, and sweat rather than requesting it by magic?”

  “Our enemies don’t want knowledge and hard work, they just resent the fact that magicians have secrets and power beyond mundane control. I just hope our spy in the capital manages to stay out of their way.”

  Yaakke thrust the shimmering white umbilical away from his heart. As fascinating as the girl seemed to be, he had to find a familiar thread and follow it out of the void—no matter where it led.

  He plucked the nearest coil of colored life away from his face. Cool and gold except for a black spot that looked as if disease burned into the shiny metal. This should be King Darville. A bright iridescent thread entwined with the gold one had to be Rossemikka.

  Slowly Yaakke sorted the cords by the colors of the people who had come close to him. Copper for Brevelan, rusty soil tinged with magician blue must be Jaylor. He deserved the blue now that he was Senior. A silver line dangled from where Yaakke’s belly button should be. An early lesson in magic theory tickled his mind. No one ever saw the true colors of his own aura until tested and found worthy by the dragons.

  Could he follow his own life back out of the void? That might lead him right back where he started—into the suspicion-riddled capital. An abrupt materialization would earn him witchbane and imprisonment at the hands of the Council.

  Then a grayish-green cord wrapped around his waist and squeezed until a sensation akin to belly cramp demanded his attention. More cautiously than before, Yaakke plucked at it. The keeper of the Bay Hag Inn appeared before him, thrashing around his filthy kitchen and pantry. He screamed and searched the cupboards. Though Yaakke couldn’t hear his words, he knew the man needed bread and cheese and dried meat to supply the last group of travelers. Every cabinet, basket, and shelf was as empty as his cash box. Illusory coins passed and exchanged by Yaakke during the coronation festival had vanished. Behind the innkeeper stood a tax collector. Without the journey rations to sell to the travelers, the innkeeper didn’t have enough cash left to pay his due. Yaakke had stolen a large portion of those rations for his fast trip away from the capital.

  An unpleasant taste penetrated Yaakke’s overloaded senses. He couldn’t remember why he’d had to steal or where he was going. He thrust aside the innkeeper. The man was a cheat and overcharged for everything from his rooms to a single mug of ale. He deserved a hefty fine for overdue taxes.

  Maybe Yaakke should search out the single crystal umbilical that was Shayla. Certainly the dragon would be willing to help him.

  Help him do what?

  He thrust h
is shadowy hand past another bluish cord. A vision of Nimbulan, the greatest magician in Coronnan’s history, shimmered before him. The exhausted founder of the Commune said a sad farewell to his beloved wife as she left Coronnan for a lonely exile. All magicians who couldn’t gather dragon magic were banished from Coronnan at the end of the great War of Disruption. All women of magic, led by Nimbulan’s wife, Myrilandel, were included in that ban.

  Yaakke knew what it was like to be alone.

  Other scenes from Coronnan’s past fled by him. He watched, fascinated, as lives wove themselves into the web that trapped Yaakke. Curiosity propelled him forward and back through time. He caressed the umbilicals, searching for . . . searching for . . .

  He couldn’t remember. Somewhere in the compelling interplay of life, he lost track of himself. Yet something told him he couldn’t waste any more time here. He had to go. But where? What was time?

  The copper umbilical glided beside him. Copper. That was important. Copper, a planetary element, anchored to the core of Kardia Hodos. Copper for Brevelan and her unique nurturing magic.

  Partial memory lightened fading corners of his mind. Brevelan, the first woman to care enough about him to teach him manners and give him hugs without attempting to pick his pockets. He had to find her clearing deep in the southern mountains. From there he needed to make his way to Shayla’s old lair higher yet in those mountains.

  He picked up the copper cord, seeking an image to guide him back out of the void.

  Instead of the clearing, he saw a cave. Jaylor and Brevelan. The two were frozen in time, reaching out in protest, Reaching out to Shayla. Yaakke watched, horrified, as a dancing Krej used his magic to transform Shayla into a glass sculpture. Every transparent hair that cloaked the dragon’s gravid body changed into a real crystal. The elegant all color/no color wing veins and spines dulled from natural iridescence to clear glass. The life within her and the lives of the twelve babies she carried stilled, stumbled, glimmered, just barely aware. Yaakke nearly dropped the copper thread of life in despair.